LOS ANGELES — In 1993, Cardinal Roger Mahony wrote to the Vatican with an urgent problem. A priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had been accused of plying teenage boys with alcohol and molesting them, sometimes during prayer.

In less than eight years, Father Kevin Barmasse had, as one church official put it in newly released files, “left a wake of devastation that is hard to comprehend.” Mahony yanked Barmasse out of his parish and wanted to make sure he couldn’t return. But Barmasse appealed to the one body that could overrule Mahony — the Vatican.

“The case has been there for many, many months,” Mahony wrote to a Vatican office handling priest misconduct. “The lengthy delay has created serious problems for my own credibility as a bishop.”

In the wake of the court-ordered release of 12,000 pages of confidential archdiocese records, Mahony has been criticized for hiding abuse allegations from police and failing to protect parishioners from molesters. But the files suggest that Mahony had to press an unresponsive Vatican to get molesting priests out of the church.

Only the pope could remove a priest from the priesthood entirely. And when Mahony turned to the Vatican, the papers show, he ran into a bureaucracy steeped in ritual, mired in delays and reluctant to come to terms with the burgeoning problem.

“Anyone in the world who had dealings with the Vatican in the ’80s and ’90s was frustrated — who’s in charge, what’s the procedure, how long it took,” said John Allen, a correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter.

Mahony dealt with multiple offices on abuse cases, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that defends church teaching and punishes those who commit delicta graviora — grave offenses. Joseph Ratzinger led the office for more than two decades before becoming Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

Mahony appeared to feel impeded in dealing with Barmasse. The priest, who was accused of abusing at least eight teenage boys, had challenged the decision to remove him. As the appeal dragged on, Mahony told a Vatican official with the Congregation for the Clergy that he planned to visit Rome in December 1993. He suggested they meet in person.

But even after his visit, the case remained unresolved.

Four months later, in March 1994, Mahony wrote: “Bishops need to be able to act quickly and decisively in cases of alleged clerical misconduct to assure the People of God that their rights are being fully protected.”

In April, he wrote: “It is now almost five months since my meeting with you and yet nothing further has come from you or your Congregation.”

Another decade would pass before Barmasse was defrocked. Troy Gray, 44, who said Barmasse molested him in the late ’80s while working in Tucson, Ariz., cringed at the lengthy delay.

“They had their own procedures and protocols,” he said in an interview. “It angers me that the children were put on the back burner.”

Neither Mahony nor Vatican officials responded to requests for comment. In a 2010 interview with an Italian newspaper that the Vatican posted on its website, a top official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said accusations that it moved glacially were “unjustified,” particularly in recent years.

Observers said the Vatican response was markedly slower in decades past.

“This is not to give the American bishops a pass, but they really had no leadership from Rome,” said Jason Berry, author of “Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.”

Bishops started asking the Holy See in the 1980s for the power to remove abusers from the priesthood. But a formal request by American bishops was turned down by the Vatican in 1993.

At the Ratzinger-led Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a staff of 45 was left “struggling to cope” with the caseload generated by the world’s 400,000 priests, wrote Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican priest who worked with the Vatican as head of the order from 1992 to 2001.

“It is generally imagined that the Vatican is a vast and efficient (organization). In fact it is tiny,” he wrote in a 2010 column for the British Catholic weekly the Tablet. “Documents slipped through the cracks. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger lamented to me that the staff was simply too small for the job.”

The labyrinthine protocol of the Vatican also made it ill-equipped to respond to a fast-evolving crisis.

When one Los Angeles priest was defrocked in 2007, the files show, he was sent two notarized copies of the Latin decree, a third copy in English and instructions to write the date by his signature “with the month spelt out in full rather than using a number.”

“It’s not a court system,” Berry said. “It’s a system of tribunals in a monarchical form of government.”

The Vatican began revamping how it handled cases in 2001, when Ratzinger centralized them in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The move has been hailed as a concrete effort to address the abuse crisis. Until Ratzinger became pope, he spent Friday mornings sifting through allegations of abuse from around the globe, work he reportedly called “our Friday penance.”

Between 2001 and 2010, the office handled about 3,000 cases, the vast majority from the U.S., said Monsignor Charles Scicluna, then the office’s chief internal prosecutor.

About 20 percent of the cases ended with the cleric being formally dismissed from the priesthood.

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